For Educators
I wrote this page to be forwarded. If you're the teacher, send it to your department head. If you're the one who signs off on the budget, everything you need is below: outcomes, curriculum fit, assessment, timing, and how many packs you need.
- Ages
- 12+
- Team size
- 3–5
- Participants
- Up to 25 per Classic pack (5 teams)
- Session length
- 45 to 90 minutes, or a three-hour deep dive
- Preparation
- About 15 minutes before the first session
- Devices
- None required for the physical edition
- Assessment
- Business Blueprint, pitch rubric and Aha! reflection
- Suitable for
- Entrepreneurship, career education, innovation, sustainability, social studies and youth programming
What Awesomeville is
A card-based entrepreneurship game for ages 12+. Teams of 3–5 get a fictional town with some strange characteristics, real community challenges to solve, and one business requirement to build around. Then they design a business, adapt it, and pitch it, all in a single class period. No devices, no accounts, no prep beyond a four-page rulebook.
Observable learning outcomes
By the end of a session, students will have found a community problem and explained why it matters. They'll have come up with several solutions and picked one using their team's own criteria. They'll have built a real business concept into their idea (a revenue model, a customer segment, or an operating constraint). They'll have changed the plan when something unexpected hit. They'll have given a structured 1–3 minute pitch covering problem, solution, fit, and pivot. And they'll have reflected on their own decisions using guided prompts.
You can see every one of those happen during play. That means you can assess without collecting anything, or you can use the artifacts described under Assessment.
Where it fits your curriculum
Awesomeville isn't formally aligned with any provincial or state curriculum, and I'm not going to claim alignment with specific course codes. Instead, here's what Awesomeville teaches in curriculum terms, so you can map it to your own outcomes in a few minutes.
Entrepreneurship and business courses
The game runs the core arc most entrepreneurship curricula share: opportunity recognition (Steps 1–2), venture concept development and business models (Step 3 and the Bylaw deck), adapting to changing conditions (Step 4), and communicating a venture concept persuasively (Steps 5 and 6). If your course covers ideation, business fundamentals, or pitching, there's a step that maps to it directly. That's my mapping, not a formal alignment, so check it against your own outcomes.
Career and employability education
Every session exercises the transferable skills these programs assess: communication, collaboration, creative problem solving, adaptability, and working within constraints. You watch them happen during play instead of reading about them afterwards.
Cross-curricular
The Opportunity deck covers themes like clean water, food access, energy, inclusion, and waste. Those connect naturally to social studies, sustainability, and citizenship education. The pitch step doubles as oral-communication practice for language arts.
Assessment
A session gives you three natural things to assess: the Business Blueprint worksheet (individual or team, collected), the pitch (assessed live), and the Aha! reflection (exit-ticket style).
Pitch rubric (in Town Hall, the resource hub that comes with every purchase). I built it around six criteria, each on a 4-point scale (out of 24):
Community insight: does the idea come from this town, or could it be anywhere? · Customer & problem: who is it for, and what are they struggling with? · Value proposition: why choose this over a copycat, or over nothing? · Business thinking: does the money make sense, and is the Bylaw genuinely built in? · Adaptability: what did the Wildcard do to the plan? · Pitch & teamwork: clear, on time, and visibly shared. Use it for grading, or hand it to student judges for peer assessment.
Session timelines
Pitch time grows with the number of teams, so that's the number to plan around. Budget the pitches first and work backwards.
| Session | Max teams | Build phases | Pitches | Reflect |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 45 min | 4 | ~28 min | 90 sec each (~8 min) | 4 min (lightning) |
| 60 min | 5 | ~35 min | 2 min each (~14 min) | 6 min |
| 90 min | 5 | ~53 min | 2–3 min each (~24 min) | 8 min |
| 2–3 hours | 5 | 75+ min | 3 min + Q&A | 15+ min |
A full pack of 5 teams fits comfortably in 60–90 minutes. Or split it over two shorter periods, which a lot of teachers prefer: a build day and a pitch day.
Class size and materials
One pack supports up to 5 teams of 3–5, so 15 to 25 students. There are towns left over, so teams can play a second round without repeats, plus spares for the Wildcards that swap or redraw towns. For bigger groups, or a few sections running at the same time, a second pack covers you. The cards are the only material. Students just need a pen and the printable Business Blueprint worksheet.
Accessibility and inclusion
I'm Brennan Daley, and I make Awesomeville in Halifax. Inclusion is built in, not bolted on. There's no reading race. Teams read together, and reading the cards aloud is a facilitation style I encourage, not a workaround. There are no devices or accounts. There are lots of ways to contribute: talkers, sketchers, builders, and quiet strategists all have real roles. And the fictional towns are there on purpose to lower the social cost of being wrong. Students who never volunteer answers will pitch imaginary businesses, because nothing in Awesomeville can be incorrect.
What facilitation requires
First session: about 15 minutes. Read the four-page rulebook and skim the deck. After that, zero prep. The Facilitator's Guide covers timing, tricky card combinations, small-group adjustments, and reflection prompts. Ready-made facilitation slides for in-person and virtual sessions are in Town Hall, the resource hub that comes with every purchase.
What educators are saying
See it before ordering opens
The fastest way to size up Awesomeville is to play it. The two-minute demo runs right in your browser: real cards, the full flow, nothing to install and no account to create. Try it yourself, or put it on the projector and run it with your class.
Try the two-minute demoOrdering isn't open yet. Join the waitlist and I'll email you when it is, with launch pricing. Questions about fit for your program? Email hello@awesomeville.ca. It goes to me and nowhere else.